MB
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A journey that led to a book
I was born in Baghdad to Kurdish parents. My family fled Saddam’s genocide of the Kurds in the early 90s, and for the next five years we were refugees. We travelled across Europe, through Turkey, Azerbaijan, Russia and many other countries in search of safety. Eventually, aged six, I ended up in the UK, but…
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Becoming an Obama Leader in 2023
I was lucky enough to be selected by the Obama Foundation as a 2023 Obama Leader. For the next six months I learned about campaigning from some of the best campaigners around the world.
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Writing the foreword for the Refugee Dictionary
The 1951 Refugee Convention enshrines the right of people fleeing the horrors of conflict and persecution to seek refuge in another country. It defines who is a refugee under international law. To mark the 70th Anniversary of these human rights, UK for UNHCR called on the public to submit their own definitions of the word “refugee”. With…
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Level Up: what I’ve learned so far
I set up a tech mentoring scheme for young people in Iraq, Iran and Syria in August, after 200+ applications, here’s what I’ve learned so far. Last year I went to Iraq to visit family, I stayed for 3 weeks. I hadn’t been back for quite some time, so when I saw my cousins again…
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Agatha Christie’s Come Tell Me How You Live
I enjoyed reading Agatha Christie’s memoirs “Come tell me how you live” which recounts her time in Iraq and Syria in the 1930s, with her archaeologist husband Max Mallowan.
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Conference diversity is your responsibility not mine
If you have invited me as a speaker to your conference, and I am the only female or ethnic minority speaker, and for some reason I have to pull out, it is not my responsibility to find you another BME woman.
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Citizen Beta #23: statistics, fact checking and data journalism
It’s taken me a couple of days to recover from the brilliant Citizen Beta we’ve just had. So much to process! We were joined by Andy Dudfield from the Office for National Statistcs, Simon Rogers from Google, John Walton from the BBC, and Lev and I showed off some recent Full Fact work. The audience…
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On learning to code
This was a blogpost I originally wrote in 2015. To my amazement, it got to the top spot of HackerNews for a few hours. I’m learning to code. I’ve been on again off again with it for about two years now. But I’ve only very recently started to feel like I could actually achieve something. I…
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From London to Arbat Refugee Camp, Iraq
Last week the money donated by strangers on the internet helped deliver 210 blankets and 175kg of rice to Arbat Refugee camp, Iraq. In July, I started a crowdfunding campaign to raise £500 to feed the displaced families in a refugee camp just outside my hometown in Iraq. Within 8 hours we had not only reached my…
Mevan Babakar 